Visiting Alaska: The OMG Beauty of It All

Hey, y'all! It's been a while. *waves* But I've been away for good reason--a ten day vacation/cruise to Alaska! : ) This was definitely a bucket list vacation for me. I've wanted to go to that part of the country for so long. Plus, there's nothing more tempting to me in the heat of Texas summer than the cool Northwest. But I have to say that the vacation far exceeded my expectations. There's beautiful. And then there's jaw-dropping, OMG, gorgeous. There were times on this trip that I couldn't believe what I was seeing was real. It was like postcards everywhere you looked.

And we got to see awesome wildlife too! A bear, some mountain goats, salmon swimming upstream, tons of bald eagles, and even whales off the side of the cruise ship. Amazing.

So, since I'm now playing catch up with work, I thought I'd just stop in and share some photos. These were all with my iPhone and have no filter on them. I couldn't put captions underneath each because I had to load the pics in gallery format, but this is from beginning to end.

We left from Vancouver on a Disney cruise then sailed to a glacier (Endicott Arm). I'm not sure how I expected a glacier to look, but wow. Then we went on to Skagway, where we took an 8 hour excursion into the Yukon Territory and took the White Pass train through the mountains. Then we went to Juneau, where hubs made me canoe FIVE MILES to a glacier. (See the picture when you scroll of hubs looking particularly smug because the view was so beautiful once we canoed over.) Last, we went to Ketchikan where we went on a rainforest walk and saw a ton of wildlife.

Enjoy!

A panorama from the ship.

Have you been to Alaska? If not, what's on your bucket list?